2026 (so far) In Review (w/ Olav Rokne)

While the stars align to kick off the 2020s, Dan takes a look at what 2026 has had to offer so far: the best of what he's seen up until mid July, the penultimate month before Oscar season starts to take shape, including big hits and the criminally (he says) underrated and also Grogu is here. But to balance that out, Olav Rokne of the Hugo Book Club blob tags in to sum up what may be the worst the year has had to offer. How bad can it get? And what beloved (by Dan) movies did you miss that you should find on streaming? All that and more as we review slightly more than half of 2026!

Find all of our episodes and the rest of Writing Therapy Productions' various entertainments at www.writingtherapyproductions.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:14

Since 1928, the Academy of Picture and Sciences has been a bit about trophies what it considers the best films of the year. This is Academy vs. Audience, where we watch all the best picture winners in the corresponding box of the champions. I'm Dan Gibbons, and we are in another little mini episode as our prospective guest as we enter the 2020s is having some technical difficulties. I only bring this up so that I'm not throwing Aaron and Claire under the bus for a mini-episode too many times unnecessarily. So, as we are slightly over halfway through 2026, thought we might do a half plus one year-in-review episode looking at the films of 2026 I've seen so far. But, listeners, absent co-hosts in all ships at sea, there is a bit of a floor to my 2026 list, because while I am no stranger to a hate watch, and as loyal listeners know, have sat through some truly abhorrent films for this very podcast, I am a little more precious about what I pay to see in theaters. So I thought maybe we needed someone who doesn't have that level of self-respect with their time and money. So joining us again is the co-founder of the Hugo Book Club, a blog dedicated to the very best in specialist fiction, who in his spare time also paid money to see Chris Pratt say that maybe cops should use AI. Welcome back, Olive Rockney.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

Thank you. I thought seeing Chris Patt or Pratt sit in a chair for an hour and a half would be funny. Joke's on me.

SPEAKER_02 1:49

True or false, you in fact got D-Box seats to watch Chris Pratt sit in a chair for an hour and a half. I saw it in 3D.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Okay. 3D just because he's sitting in a chair the whole movie. What is the point of 3D?

SPEAKER_02 2:05

Do you really need those various screens he looks at to pop? Is that what we're doing here?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I guess so. You know, I've got actually a lot to say about that movie, and I'm just gonna jump into it right now because we're talking about mercy. I have opened that door for you, proceed. Okay. First off, the system of justice depicted in this movie is truly bonkers. It is not rational or reasonable, and does not stand up to even the slightest bit of of analysis, critical thinking. We're talking a system where they've got an AI who is human-like, and it's the this this movie's set in like 2031. We're talking five years down the road. I'm sorry, you're not going to have an AI, Rebecca Ferguson, that quickly, who is able to access literally any computer system on the planet, which is a privacy nightmare. Like, the uh evidentiary chain involved in all of these steps is so utterly unreasonable. And then to have the trial be timed an hour and a half, there's no cross-examination, you've got somebody in a chair who, if they don't know the system or how to build a case, how are they supposed to build a proper defense? This is I I think that just labeling it as an AI system of justice is doing a disservice to the idea of an AI system of justice, which is a terrible idea. This is an even terribler, worse, stupider, more pathetic system of justice. And then, and then we see exactly two cases played out through this system. The murder case that launched it, that Chris Pratt's character was so proud of the mercy system working and getting this guy off the streets and dead. Well, it turns out that that was a false conviction that the dude was actually innocent to begin with, and he was convicted by the mercy court based on not actually listening to the phone records of the suspect's cell phone. So the system can access anything, and they didn't bother to t to actually look at the outgoing calls from this dude's cell phone.

SPEAKER_02 4:39

So it can look at any computer system, but it just doesn't if it's inconvenient.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Right. And then the second case that we actually see play out through this is Chris Pratt's case, who is also three seconds from being executed while being innocent. So we're talking a system of justice that is not only utterly ludicrous on the face of it, the movie shows that the system of justice doesn't work to figure out who is guilty and who is not. Now, I'm going to go one step further and say throughout this movie, it's got a measure of how likely is the suspect guilty. A percentage. Like you can reductively say, oh, this is all of the evidence we have, it's 93% ch uh percent likely that he's innocent. And and reasonable doubt is set at precisely 86%. So if your chances of guilt are lower than 86%, according to this numerical metric, you're going to be not executed. But if you're over 86, even by half a percent, you're you're gonna get executed. This is such bullshit.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

As in any just system, if there is a 14% chance that you are innocent, execution should be completely off the table. I know. Now So they make the worst possible AI run court system for this movie, and then still end it with Chris Pratt saying, maybe AI is good.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

No. It's not even that clear. It's the movie's ending is the AI system saying, maybe we have learned something, and then she shuts herself off. So it's it's not it's not a clear-cut ending, because they don't take the time to actually end it. resolve any of the well, the ending is that this bomb plot, his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor has kidnapped his daughter and filled a truck full of explosives and has been driving it towards the Mercy Court because his the AI sponsor, as it turns out, is the secret brother of the first person executed through the Mercy Court. You're following? Yeah. The person who was executed unjustly, the homeless person who was executed unjustly, turns out to be secretly the brother of Chris Pratt's Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, who has framed Chris Pratt in order to have vengeance on the Mercy Court. It it's it makes no sense. The point is. That's elaborate. It is. So this truck full of explosives, which, by the way, the murder was actually committed in order to cover up the purchase of the explosives to fill the truck with so he could blow up the mercy court. That truck ends up crashing into the mercy court, there's a whole hostage situation, Chris Pratt saves the day, having been released from the chair, like for the last 15 minutes of the movie. The hostage situation gets resolved. We discover that Chris Pratt's partner is the one who suppressed evidence because she wanted to show that the Mercy Court worked by framing some innocent dude. All of these plot lines get resolved, and then they have this platitudinous, well, I guess we learned something. Okay, what is it? What did you learn? What do we learn? You don't engage with the ideas of this completely bonkers, awful court system. Chris Pratt is a terrible actor who has done some good stuff. Guardians of the Galaxy, great. Rebecca Ferguson, great actress, who is dreadful in this. It's inconsistent, it's sometimes got emotion, sometimes she's got this weird sort of flat affect. Everything doesn't work in this movie except for the end credits, because they have Sun Lux over the end credits, Sun Lux, who did this who won an Academy Award for the soundtrack to Everything Everywhere All At Once. Right. Great song. The point is, nothing almost nothing in this movie works. It shouldn't have been made. Chris Pratt needs to stop trying to make original sci-fi movies because Passengers was also dreadful. And from my perspective, the fact that Mercy is maybe the fourth worst movie I saw this year is a damning indictment. Damning indictment of Hollywood this year.

SPEAKER_02 9:30

Yeah, that should be the rock bottom. That is indictment of Hollywood and a little bit you, because we have three more after it, that you saw on purpose. Now, okay, so I'm a fan of Rebecca Ferguson getting paid, but I hate to say this, but I have to say it in the same vein as Reed Richards had to say, if we gave Galactus our baby, this would all be over. I just need us to understand that's an option. Was this the movie for Tilly Norwood? Should instead of Rebecca Ferguson it just been a special effect they are trying to grift us into thinking is an actress? No, because Tilly Norwood should never be cast in anything. That's basically my thought, is just I don't know, maybe that would have brought down the Tilly Norwood experiment in the same way that Seth Green accidentally killed NFTs, in that he was going to make a sitcom based around his NFT, but someone stole it, and Hollywood Studios said, wait, that can happen? That can happen. We can we can make a multi-million dollar project around one of these stupid ape drawings, and someone can just then take it and they own our IP. Okay, maybe we don't get on this train. Instead, it's just like maybe you should have done Mission Impossible 8. But Well, definitely she should have done Mission Impossible 8. I understand her logic for not doing it. She did two seasons of a TV show and like at least one Dune waiting for them to actually get that movie finished.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

I mean, I I love that franchise. I love Christopher Macquarie. But they were already filming Final Reckoning when Dead Reckoning came out, and it still took two years to get that thing into a theater. So, I almost dread to ask, even though I know the answer, what do you got that's worse than Mercy?

SPEAKER_00 11:22

Well, I'm trying to think what order to stack these in. The next worst, so my third least favorite movie of the year is Melania.

SPEAKER_02 11:33

Also, should not have two under it. That should not be allowed in a just society with a functioning art system.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

So, the four worst movies of the year are all varying degrees of fascism, okay? Like, Mercy is a vaguely fascist criminal justice system, but it doesn't really take a stand about whether or not that system of justice works.

SPEAKER_02 11:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Melania is the passive-aggressive fascism. It is a propaganda piece. Now, I thought it would be funny to laugh at Melania. I'd heard it was very badly made. So I went and bought a ticket to a movie about a monster from Eastern Europe, and instead of going into the theater for Dracula, I went into the theater next door Melania, and it is kind of weird that those two movies were out at the same time. Melania is just boring. It says nothing. It's sort of listless. Uh and I don't know what anyone is supposed to take away from that movie. Like, it it's hard to even call it a propaganda piece, because at no point do you get the sense that Melania is a person. Nice, bad, good, whatever. There's no there. There's nothing there. Although I did laugh at one scene where Mel it's the night of the inauguration, and Donald Trump calls Melania, and they've got this recording of the two of them talking, and he says, Did you watch it on TV? She says, No. And there's this sort of sadness to Donald Trump as he's saying, Really? You didn't watch it? It was good. You would have liked it. It's really good. He's like pleading. And it's weirdly pathetic. So Melania is just a badly made documentary. It's it's like a two-hour perfume commercial. Yeah. So that was worse than Mercy, because at least Mercy was something. Was something. Melania was just nothing. Now, the second worst movie I saw was Balls Up.

SPEAKER_02 13:49

This one I only know about because you saw it, and Nando V Movies watched it as part of his research on has James Gunn actually cast Wonder Woman? Which time of recording, probably not. And I don't think James Gunn hates me as much as Kevin Feige, so if I say probably not on the internet, he's not gonna prove me wrong in a week.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Yeah, um Balls uh I didn't want to watch it. I was at a movie night with friends, and it was one person's turn to choose. And this is somebody whose opinion of movies includes the statement that Dra Dungeons and Dragons honor amongst thieves was boring because they talked too much. That is a genuine opinion that this person, who I am not gonna name on the air, uh has said out loud. It's a terrible opinion and he ought to be ashamed. Very much so. He laughed at balls up throughout at kinda flat, kinda gross, kinda misogynist jokes. It's it's an incredibly boring movie about marketing executives pitching full-body condoms at the World Cup, and it just they they end up on the run after they do something dumb. It's it's officially sponsored by FIFA, and I know it's been a bad year for FIFA, but I think this is the worst FIFA-related event of the year.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

Oh dang.

SPEAKER_00 15:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

That's that's saying a lot. Even I know that from cursory familiarity with this year's World Cup.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

I'm not sure, maybe not worse, but definitely the most embarrassing. And I mean, it's directed by Peter Farrelly. So, like, there's talent there. I mean, he's made movies that were, I guess, more successful than this.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

I mean, sometimes people make better movies in other parts of their career and are still capable of letting you down. Well, look at Robert Zemeckis. Robert Semechis discovered mocap animation, and we lost him forever. I'm sorry, I've forgotten what he made. Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. No, I know that. Uh, then the uh the all-CG Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey, the all-CG Beowulf, Polar Express, the Christmas nightmare feel film that that is. Bunch of Deadeye children do a number about how much they love hot chocolate, and the plot is not progressed at all. I mean, that sounds very made for streaming, right? This is a movie you have on in the background, and you look up and you go, huh, once or twice while you do your laundry and fold your towels.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Yes. Yeah. So the last and worst movie of this year, and I'm gonna say possibly that I have ever seen.

SPEAKER_02 16:46

And we've established you do not have a high bar for what you're willing to watch.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

I wanted to be re I was told that tonight we were podcasting about the best and worst movies of the year. So I went out and I watched a movie called Citizen Vigilante.

SPEAKER_02 17:04

Oh no.

SPEAKER_00 17:06

Which, um I actually think is a hate crime. And I don't mean that as a uh that's not me trying to make a punchline out of this.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

I actually think Not in the way people will describe the Cats movie as a war crime.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

No, this is something that Yui Ball should actually be facing hate speech charges over. It is a deeply uh vile film that if I had my way would not be available for purchase or rental anywhere, and maybe available in university libraries for academics uh studying hate speech and radicalization. It is of no artistic value, it is badly made, it is badly acted, it is just shocking, beginning to end, it is it's heartless, it blames society's ills on people who have the least resources to defend themselves, it is mean, and I think it's deeply saddening that there is a segment of who are holding it up as something worthwhile.

SPEAKER_02 18:25

There is something desperately sad about the rights need to seem like they're cool, and their pathetic attempts to convince us that this kid rock concert is as good as the Bad Bunny concert, or in this case, that watching sex cannibal army hammer in a Juve Ball movie is better than Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, because at least they didn't have to look at a trans person.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

I expected it not to be good. Like, I fully expected it not to be good. I've seen three previous Juve Ball movies. He is not a good filmmaker.

SPEAKER_02 19:09

He is not. House of the Dead was hilariously bad in places, although it full on broke one of my friends 20 minutes in. Alone in the Dark, I only remember for having the most tacked-on sex scene I've ever witnessed, in that Tara Reed stumbles into Christian Slater's warehouse laboratory/slash open concept bedroom, and they have one poorly lit sex scene, and then in the next shot, she is back in her not yet attractive ponytail and glasses. As if she just wandered in and said, Hey, it's me, let's do this. Okay, let's not talk about this anymore. I'm going back into my bookish mode. Just implying that somebody said they should hook up, and he's shoved it somewhere into the movie. And then, of course, Blood Rain is the movie about a video game in which a vampire kills Nazis that he decided to set in medieval times so that nothing bad would have to happen to a Nazi.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

And then there is Postal, which is a whole other layer of bad. There's a lot of racism there, there's a meandering, incoherent plot. But I didn't expect Citizen Vigilante to be quite as didactic as it was. Like, okay, this is racist Batman. It's a dude who's angry at some subset of people, and is committing acts of violence extrajudicially against people he believes to be guilty. It's Batman.

SPEAKER_02 20:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

It's racist Batman.

SPEAKER_02 20:47

Racist Batman. But it's a Batman who only picks on immigrants. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

But it is what's missing is Uwe Bol approached those other movies trying to tell a story. He was bad at it. It's a bad story. It's got poor subtext. In this movie, he's got an axe to grind. This is didactic. He doesn't trust the audience enough to let them connect the dots. Uwe Bol is saying, I am depicting this racist Batman as a hero. That's not enough for him. He needs half the movie to be somebody talking straight at the camera and telling them what to think. It is half racist, bigoted rant that if this were in Germany, they would literally be charging the filmmaker for. Like, I swear to God, Germany has more stringent anti hate crime laws than a lot of other nations do, and they would actually do something about this. The news broadcasts inside the movie are the news broadcaster telling the audience what to. Think. It is the the their quote-unquote mainstream world news TV show spends literally the entire broadcast just belaboring these points and telling the audience what the problem is and what the solution is.

SPEAKER_02 22:17

Even the Robocop remake need to do that ironically.

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:22

It is honestly, I I am kind of appalled that this got made. It is a failure on every single ground, morally, ethically, artistically. And Army Hammer does not need to do this. It's not like Army Hammer needs the money. The man is literally the grandson of Arm and Hammer. Like the billionaire. He is in a billionaire family. He does not need to work for a living.

SPEAKER_02 22:56

Cannot think this is his road back to legitimate Hollywood stardom.

unknown 23:00

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

He must believe in it. He must believe in this project. He is a worse person than I had expected a sex cannibal to be.

SPEAKER_02 23:12

Wow. That's a sentence. So that's as bad as it got. Why don't we, Dante's Inferno style, start climbing towards what I think some of the best films of the years are so far in this, still technically July of 2026, before I even really know what the best picture shortlist is going to be.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Uh before we move on, can I just uh ask you briefly, have I convinced you to watch one of these four movies?

SPEAKER_02 23:40

Oh dear God, no. Like, in you don't even drink. You can't even try to obliterate the memory of having done this. Sad that the one I would watch most is Mercy, but even then, no, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 23:54

I forgot one detail about Citizen Vigilante that you will not believe. So, you know how they often try and make the protagonist of such a movie a, you know, sympathetic figure? Like if we're talking Death Witch Wish, which with Charles Bronson, which is a little bit fashion, or Dirty Harry, which is a lot more fashion. You know, all of these gu vigil guys going out and shooting bad guys kind of movies. There's like a the the protagonist is always a sympathetic character. Guess how they made Army Hammer sympathetic? Uh Dead wife? Oh no. He has neither a wife nor kids. Dog? Nope. Terrible. He is a landlord who didn't get paid on time.

SPEAKER_02 24:45

Son of a bitch! He's one of the least sympathetic types of person we currently have. Yep. How many businesses would still be up and running if they just said, okay, no more rent until COVID's gone? I thought you'd appreciate that detail. I feel better about the bottom of my list now. Okay, what's the bottom of your list? Okay, I have the 19 2026 releases I've seen, including one, at least two, that have are counted on Letterboxd 2025 because of festivals who were not available for the public until this year, so I count them. I have Maggie Gillenhall's The Bride at number 19, and I can say at least they were trying something. Like I was on board for Frankenstein, Bonnie, and Clyde ripping through Prohibition America on a monstrous crime spree, and I'd even be on board with the unraveling mystery of who the bride was before and how that's tied to a notorious mob boss. But I think you talk about leaning into the camera and telling people exactly who to how to think. This is like a micro dose of that, but the bride actually at one point starting to shout, me too, me too, me too, was it was a bridge too far. Also, I understand the ethos behind let's reinsert Mary Shelley into the sequel she never got to write. Bride of Frankenstein was creation of 1930s Hollywood's executives, who, as we know, are basically gangsters who never face prosecution. So, yeah, let's let's experiment with that, but Mary Shelley's contributions to the story are to occasionally possess the lead character before and after her death and resurrection, in order to shout nonsense in a Scottish accent, helping lead to her death, and also to develop the catchphrase, I prefer not to, which Mary Shelley full-on admits is a quote from Herman Melville. So you're going to try to make the Bride of Frankenstein into a feminist icon, but you're going to find her catchphrase from the B side of the Moby Dick guy? Not even Moby Dick. The lesser-known works that I only know of because of an episode of Archer that used the exact same quote. Billy Bud? Could be that one.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

In Melville's lifetime, it was a better known book than Moby Dick was.

SPEAKER_02 27:21

Bartleby the Scrivener.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 27:23

And yeah, it's like, you're telling me that you couldn't find a gothic or romantic or eight nineteenth century at all female author who came up with a pithy way of saying no to something? Not with Jane Austen, four Bronte. Not one March sister came up with a pithy way to say no, thank you. We gotta go to Herman Melville.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

I haven't seen this movie, but what I have seen of it does make me think it looks good. Like it is a well-made on technical levels kind of movie.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Yeah, it is. It's it's competently made, at least, which I think puts it above everything you just talked about.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

Oh, much, much, much so.

SPEAKER_02 28:06

It just really trips over itself in trying a little too hard to get its message across. And in the same way that Todd Phillips set Joker in the 1980s, but still did occupy Wall Street. It's like, why are we doing Riot Girls in the 1920? Maybe could have rocked with, except it was again, it's just I want to be on board with this story. It's just trying a little too hard in the wrong ways. Like, I have seen a movie where a floating creature in a magician's robe and hat floats down to deliver the moral of the movie we just watched, and that was more subtle than some of the parts of this movie. At number 18, we find Crime 101, which I find it it's a it's a heist movie of sorts, starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Hallie Berry, and Barry Kyogen. But it doesn't have heist energy. It's like Chris Hemsworth is being pressured to do these jobs, but his boss is impatient or such like and is thus hiring worse people to jump in and do them instead. So he'll set up a perfect no one gets hurt heist, and then Barry Kyogen will go in and do it almost hilariously wrong if they were actually capable of filming that scene for comedy. So I just found it languid instead of taut and intentionally awkward instead of trying to be cool, and just an hour too long for the story that it was. You're not making me want to see it. I gave it a three, but considering where it is, I I'm not yet at endorsing levels. I'm like, I can understand why Friend of the Pod Munsey Parker Monroe took a bath on that one in our fantasy box office league. A lot of star power, none of them really being able to flex to their usual abilities.

SPEAKER_00 29:56

I would always rather see a noble failure like The Bride or Megalopolis than something that's just kind of aiming for mid that sticks at mid.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

That I'm about the same. That's why I've often said, how do I even give a star rating to Megalopolis? How do you quantify a four-star viewing of a two-star movie? Like this movie, Megalopolis, is not great, as I think I may have even said on this podcast at one point. But man, is it fascinating to see them swinging for the fences and whiffing almost every time. Number 17 is where I put your favorite animated movie of the year, the Super Mario Galaxy movie, which you drove from Edmonton insisting I see with you.

SPEAKER_00 30:42

I lost a wager and you made me watch it with you.

SPEAKER_02 30:46

If if we're pretending that your hand was not involved in this decision, why did you try so hard to lose your own Oscar pool? I didn't. I tried to win.

SPEAKER_00 30:57

With your oops all upsets ballot? No, it wasn't oops all upsets. I think I had three upsets.

SPEAKER_02 31:04

Now, look, I liked the visuals, I enjoyed some of the gags. Even I admit that in place of character arcs, there is a lot of jingling Nintendo's keys in front of us saying, hey, remember this rifle accessory for shooting games? It's gonna turn Mario and Luigi into babies so we can do a Yoshi's Island riff for the next four minutes. I get it. I get that that's what they're doing. I get that it implies they don't think much of me. I still had fun with it. And I had a little extra fun at how absolutely openly miserable you were the whole time. Even though it was your idea to watch it.

SPEAKER_00 31:41

It was not my idea to watch it. This was the fifth worst movie I saw this year. It was an empty cavalcade of signifiers with nothing behind it. It was nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. And as somebody who never owned a Nintendo and who didn't get most of those references, it just felt incredibly vapid.

SPEAKER_02 32:10

Oh yeah, if you don't know Mario stuff, it's going to lose you completely.

SPEAKER_00 32:14

Scene after scene where they go to Egypt for some reason, and it I don't know. It just was scene after scene of just things happening, and a series of in disconnected events is not a plot. It seemed like things happening just for the sake of them happening.

SPEAKER_02 32:34

I'd love to disagree with you, but again, Bar and Luigi get turned into babies so we could do Yoshi's Island for four minutes. It has no impact on anything else.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

I think this was the most miserable I was at a movie this year.

SPEAKER_02 32:48

Oh, listeners, the way he would sigh in pain. Yeah. To progress up my uh most common star ranking on Letterboxd, the three and a half district, which is I'm not saying this is great, but I had fun with it, and I like basically what they did. We come to time travel gangster comedy, Mike and Nick and Nick and Alice, in which Vince Vaughn travels back from the future to stop James Marson from getting killed, his biggest obstacle being younger Vince Vaughn. I think this is higher on my list.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

I gave it the same star rating, but this was beginning to end fun carried by some really delightful cast members just just flexing their charisma muscles. You know, James Marsden is pretty much good in everything he does. You've you've just got joyful character actors in this. You've got Keith David doing his Keith David thing, and let's be honest, he's great.

SPEAKER_02 33:48

Yeah, Steven Root, who's right next to Michael Stuhlbarg as automatic sign this movie is g is upticked. Always love Steven Root. And give me a simple, fun movie of charismatic actors, including a scene where various gangsters argue about who is the best boyfriend for Rory on the Gilmore Girls.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

I'm happy, I'm in it. Dolph Lundgren. He's just fun. Don't see enough of him these days.

SPEAKER_02 34:13

You don't. I mean he's getting up there, and it's if he wants to retire, good for him, he's done good work.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

Yeah, I recommend this to people.

SPEAKER_02 34:22

It's an entertaining time travel romp with some great action sequences and a fun concept to it. Yeah. See, that's what I said about my list having a bit of a floor, because I haven't sought out quite as much of the Drex of 2026 as my colleague has. 15 is where I put 28 Years Later The Bone Temple.

SPEAKER_00 34:40

I liked it a lot, not as much as its uh previous movie, but still very good.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

I would probably have ranked it higher if I had not just watched Twenty-Eight Years Later, which I thought had a a stronger emotional heart to it.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

Yeah, well. I cried in literally and openly in the theater while watching 28 Years Later.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

Not that I'm ever against watching Jack O'Connell be an unhinged villain. He's of course from series three and four of Skins, where he was the obligatory heel character who you eventually grow to love a little more organically than Nicholas Holt did in series one and two. And now that he has been an unhinged villain in a vampire movie and a zombie movie, I guess I need him to be an unhinged cult leader werewolf. I'd be down with that. Let's get to that, Hollywood. Did you get uh the Jimmy Saville references in this? I didn't know them when I heard about that scene at the end of 28 years later. I am now more familiar with the life and works and terrible, terrible crimes of Jimmy Saville.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

I thought a bunch of the very deep-cut British references worked well in Bone Temple.

SPEAKER_02 35:51

And I can respect that, because there's some deep-cut Canadian references that are gonna happen later in my list that are not that far off, maybe in terms of scale, but in a similar neighborhood to let's do a Jimmy Saville reference. Like one American reviewer I follow saying, okay, let me try to explain it to you. Imagine all these people showed up at the end of the movie wearing sweater vests and handing out jello pudding pops. Number 14 is where I put a movie that I think I'm the only one still talking about, The Rip, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck from director Joe Carnahan, about two cops who run seizures of drug money, who have found an epically huge stash in the house of Sasha Kage from The Flash, but are concerned, rightfully so, that someone gonna steal it. It's effectively tense and keeps you guessing about who the secret villain of this movie might be, even if you look back and say, well, obviously it's him. He didn't put that actor in this movie for no reason.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

I haven't seen it, but it's good to see Matt Damon and uh Ben Affleck uh side by side again.

SPEAKER_02 36:58

It's nice to see them just hang out and bro out in a movie. Number 13 is where I put one of the movies that let me down the most in our fantasy box office list, one that I feel is a very love it or hate it kind of a flick, disclosure day, from Steven Spielberg.

SPEAKER_00 37:15

I was really excited for for this. I only gave it three stars and put it below Bone Temple and Mike and Nick and Nick and Dallas.

SPEAKER_02 37:25

I understand the critique of it ends when the story should actually start. I don't necessarily agree, but I can see how someone gets to that conclusion. But I think the cast is really good, including the one actress that I had not heard of, who plays Josh O'Connell's girlfriend, who has to deal with being mind-controlled by Colin Firth now and again.

SPEAKER_00 37:47

And I just like seeing Wyatt Russell and Coleman Domingo and stuff.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

Always good to see those two. I've yet to not like either of them in a thing, and that includes being in Wicked for Good for three seconds is the Cowardly Lion, delivering the absolutely unhinged take of we can't trust her, she let me out of a cage. Yeah? I know that was Bach's explanation for how she'd wronged the cowardly lion, but we weren't supposed to think he was right. Number twelve is where I rank the drama with Robert Pattinson and Zendaya. Very black comedy, but an engaging one, they spiral out so effectively. I wanted to see this one. I saw it in theaters because it looked interesting and I wanted to see it. And so I sought it out. And it did perhaps give me my biggest laugh on a jump cut this entire year so far. Cuz they're trading their darkest secrets when they are abusing their uh wedding menu tasting to get way too much wine. And Zandaya's secret is that she almost did a school shooting, but someone else did a shooting that day, and she lost her nerve on it. And ultimately, seeing the effect somebody else's mass shooting had, decided actually that was a pretty shit thing I was gonna do. So maybe I'm an anti-gun advocate now. But a lot of people couldn't move past the you were about to do a mass shooting at your school. And so Robert Pattinson is trying to deal with this about his fiancee, trying to adapt to this new piece of information. When they go to interview with their photographer, and it just smash cuts the two of them with these thousand-yard stairs, is their photographer saying, 'So we're gonna shoot you, and then we're gonna shoot you two together, then we're gonna shoot your family, and then we're gonna shoot you with your family.' And I was just howling in the theater.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

That is pretty good. I didn't know the big uh reveal of that, so uh now it's spoiled for me.

SPEAKER_02 39:51

Sorry about that, but it does happen pretty early on, and thus it it's hard to talk about without bringing that up.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

No, and that that is a pretty interesting angle.

SPEAKER_02 40:03

Eleven is where I have the backrooms. Really? I might boost it on rewatch, especially if I don't stick around for the post-credit sequence that they added for the Everything Must Go edition. Oh, I haven't seen that. It's basically a 50-minute episode of the web series, as far as I can tell. So it's 15 minutes of procedural work on what's happening in the backrooms, one jump scare, and then the lights are up. And it's the same jump scare from throughout the rest of the episode or the rest of the movie.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

You haven't mentioned Mandalorian and Grogu yet. However, you gave that three and a half stars and you gave backrooms four stars on Letterboxd. So, Mr. Gibbons, are you certain that you preferred Mandalorian and Grogu to backrooms?

SPEAKER_02 40:49

There is sometimes a differentiation between my rating of the film's inherent quality versus my rating of my enjoyment of the film. And thus my ranking list tend not to be a linear progression of one and a half to five. Sometimes I say this is a three and a half star movie, but I had more fun with it than I did at this objectively better made movie.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Backrooms was very high up on my list this year. I thought quite highly of it.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

I guess my quibble is coming to the fact that the backrooms, I don't know that they're doing as much with them as perhaps they could have. It felt very much like how the first purge movie is just sort of a bog standard home invasion movie against the backdrop of all crime is legal for one night, and then in the sequels we will play more with the actual world we have created. Right now we just only have the budget for this one house in Ethan Hawk. Now, I do think that the backrooms is inherently better than the first purge movie because we do have this story about getting trapped in our own personal behavior loops or our own traumas that is magnified by the backrooms. So everything that Chivitel Aishafor is doing wrong in his life is just being looped, magnified, and distorted throughout the backrooms, and that is what gives us tension and story and body count. I just felt that woo, it's the backrooms, was just sort of there.

SPEAKER_00 42:27

Yeah, I can see that. I thought it was just enough of a weird concept, and them traveling through and getting lost in those spaces was enough to creep me out.

SPEAKER_02 42:40

They did film the backrooms in a very effectively eerie way. Gotta give it that, and that's what's pushing it to the four-star.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

And my Zoom background at work for the next like two weeks was one of the back rooms, and it took two weeks for anybody on a call to actually recognize it and get the joke.

SPEAKER_02 43:00

Uh, number 10, I have They Will Kill You, which Zaisie Beats needs to fight her way through a group of wealthy satanic immortals to try to save her younger sister, that she lost track of after failing to save her from their foster dad. It's some gruesome fun. I don't know that I have a lot to say about it beyond that.

SPEAKER_00 43:21

Well, it does sound a little similar to another movie on your list.

SPEAKER_02 43:25

Project Hailemary?

SPEAKER_00 43:27

Ready or not to?

SPEAKER_02 43:28

I haven't actually seen Ready or Not 2. I do want to because I quite love the first one. And love me some Samara Weaving and some Elijah Wood being a weirdo.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

It is literally as good a sequel as uh as that movie could have gotten.

SPEAKER_02 43:44

It's like I was intr intrigued to see it. It's just you have to understand sometimes how little I want to leave my house on my weekends. Like I'm out of soda stream syrup, and all I have to do is drive a short distance to a safe way or Canadian tire. When that problem is solved, instead I'm gonna Have someone deliver me a 2-liter bottle of Coke Zero. Number 9, of course, is the movie that you will disagree with me about the most after the Mario's, is Mando and Grogu's. Of course, only I can really speak to this one because only I have seen it.

SPEAKER_00 44:16

And it will likely remain thus, uh, because the reviews have not been kind, and I find that horrid little green monkey thing to be kind of repugnant.

SPEAKER_02 44:28

Which would make the best sequence of the movie where Baby Yoda, aka Grogu, and four of the little puppet mechanics, like from Rise of Skywalker, have to save Mandalorian from the Swamp Planet. Now I will say about this that some people have said it is just a season of the series crammed into one episode, and I think I understand the logic because it is very episodic and narrative. But it's not quite as episodic as an actual season of The Mandalorian, because no one understood episodic television like Mandalorian in its early seasons. Where, like, yes, they're every 30 minutes we're in a new location dealing with a new set of problems, but on the series it'd be like, now we gotta go to this planet, and we have to help Timothy Olifant out with his problem in order to get to the next part of our overarching plot line. It was very white-collar or burn notice or any of the episodic crime of the week things that I usually would enjoy, only with Space Star Wars backgrounds. Now, I would say that this would have been my second favorite season of The Mandalorian, because season two got bogged down in backdoor piloting characters from the Clone Wars and Rebels, which I have not seen. And season three was a bit more about Bo Katan. See my previous statement about backdoor piloting characters from the Clone Wars I haven't seen. But I do stand by one article I read about have people forgotten how to just go to the movies and have fun? Like, why are people saying this doesn't do enough to shape the future of Star Wars as a franchise? This is a fun little adventure about a man and his adopted son to have an escapades.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

You know what? I'm with you there. I am so tired of movies needing to do some kind of heavy lifting on franchise maintenance or setting up the next thing or making sure the brand isn't undermined.

SPEAKER_02 46:28

Yeah, maybe the young Han Solo movie did not need to be explaining how he got the Millennium Falcon and why it's shaped like that, and how he got his blaster, and why his name is Han Solo, and that it's because he's alone. Maybe it should have just been a heist flick with a young Han Solo. And when it was, it actually worked. Exactly. Maybe maybe if they want to get back into larger epic storylines, they can do that, but in between, you're not doing franchise maintenance, you're just doing fun little adventure stories. Yep. Number eight, where I put send help. Sam Raimi and Rachel McAdams and the guy who played Dan Aykroyd in the Saturday Night Live biopic as a CEO, and the accountant he was about to fire gets stranded on an island, and the accountant was super into this situation. This one is also fun and only has one moment that really challenges the, you know what, good for her nature of this particular suspense comedy, where you think, okay, Rachel McAdams, that might have been a line in the sand, this particular choice you've just made. But overall, uh, screw this guy, and I'm glad you are tormenting him on an island. I will say that Amanda the Jedi captioned the thumbnail of her video on this, just say thank you, mommy, and I assumed that was a line from the movie. And no, it is just her summing up how she would have responded in this exact situation. Rachel McAdams is always good. This was this was a good time, and it remains the first and only movie that I have seen in Screen X. What is Screen X? Screen X is when in certain scenes there is more movie on the walls.

SPEAKER_00 48:10

Oh, okay. I saw a Star Trek movie in that. It's kind of mid.

SPEAKER_02 48:16

Yeah, I will say that I saw it in Screen X entirely on by accident. I did not know that there were even theaters in my city that could do that. But, you know, that was fine. Number seven, at present. At present, I have Supergirl. Now I will say this about Supergirl and Mandalorian Grogu. No one is better than me at convincing themselves that a movie they've been excited for and are seeing in the theaters is good actually. I convinced myself that I liked David Ayres' Suicide Squad for months. Ooh, wow.

SPEAKER_00 48:51

That takes commitment.

SPEAKER_02 48:53

Then I watched it on Blu-ray and realized, oh god, we are 30 minutes in and we don't have a plot yet. But we have had 23 needle drops.

SPEAKER_00 49:03

I think David Ayer's suicide squad is a little bit overhated, and I would like to see the Ayer cut.

SPEAKER_02 49:11

I would watch the Ayer cut if it became available, but I think there are foundational problems to the story that a different cut doesn't solve, one of which is Jared Leto, but there are others. So, you know, watch the skies. The recovered Supergirl episode is not far away now, and we'll see how I feel upon re-watch re-examination, and grappling with the fact that, as I'm going to admit to Keith, this movie either has too much logo or not enough logo, but not the right amount of logo.

SPEAKER_00 49:42

What I'd like to say about Supergirl is that the genius of the comic book upon which it is based was that it's told from Ruthie's perspective. And so it allows a certain mythologizing of Supergirl and questioning who she is. It is not as effective when you center the the movie on Supergirl, and Ruthie becomes a supporting character.

SPEAKER_02 50:11

That is true, but I will argue that the issue is the comic book Woman of Tomorrow, which is a masterwork, it is about a veteran Supergirl who has already been through all these things, and thus we get Ruthie giving an outside perspective to build the mythology of who Supergirl is. It is a way for Tom King to say Supergirl is cooler than she is given credit. And of course, the art by uh Bilquis Ivy, is that how it's Bilquis Everly, isn't it? Everly? The impact that her art has cannot be cannot be overstated. Tom King will be the first one to say that her art is a huge part of what makes the book work, and maybe the visuals don't quite get there, but also that would have cost another 150 million that the box office would not have recouped. And this is about a rookie supergirl who needs to figure out who she is. It is her journey to saying, you know what, maybe heroism is my path forward. So it can't have that same hook. And one could say, then why did you make this the first movie about the supergirl? But you know, the industry is what it is, and I would not have faith that they would be able to get an entire trilogy of Supergirl movies ending with a Woman of Tomorrow adaptation. Oh, probably fair. It's like in the early 2000s, I said, I guess I better try to like this Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie when it comes up, because it might be the only one I ever get. And the time of recording, I called that. It was. So I can see saying, well, let's kick off with the best Supergirl story and see if that works. But I I don't want to get too deep into it because I do have to talk about this with Keith before long. Uh number six is one I also don't want to spend too much time on, because I just did talk about it with Keith in that episode would be out in about a week after this episode. Masters of the Universe. Which is delightful.

SPEAKER_00 52:18

Yeah, it's a decent, fun, disposable popcorn flick. Some just fun.

SPEAKER_02 52:25

It's an incredible amount of fun, and it moves fast to the point where I've now seen it three times, and when Keith told me that he doesn't become He-Man until an hour into the movie, I was still surprised it took that long. Because it moves along and it keeps the pre-Power of Gray Skull sequences engaging and entertaining enough that you don't feel the weight.

SPEAKER_00 52:50

I would not have put it as high on my list. I also wouldn't have put Supergirl as high. They're like Mortal Kombat 2. They're just better than Disclosure Day, but just entertaining.

SPEAKER_02 53:03

I have a lot of room in my heart for you was set out to be incredibly entertaining and you have succeeded.

SPEAKER_00 53:09

Then you you haven't seen Mortal Kombat 2, and you should.

SPEAKER_02 53:13

Yeah, I'll get to it. Again, my couch is so comfy and all of my video games are here. It's available on streaming. Number 5, Obsession. This movie is disturbing in very effective ways. I saw it with friend of the podcast, Buncy Parker Monroe. She had heard nothing about the story, was horrified the whole time. I haven't seen it yet.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

I probably will eventually.

SPEAKER_02 53:39

Indy Navaret from Superman and Lois is absolutely amazing in the movie. The scenes where the true forgot what her name is. Anyway, as the real person underneath the effect of this wish is struggling to get out. She plays that dichotomy so well. And there are moments in this movie that just have clung to me in the months since I saw it. So if you like horror, it's an absolute recommend. But it is of a genre of horror that I feel Can't Zone Amanda the Jedi has identified as mean, which is this is not the movie where the final girl triumphs over the evil and feels good about herself.

SPEAKER_00 54:21

Sounds uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 54:23

I could talk for quite some time about, but do we know for certain that the One Wish Willows are evil? Or is it just like the makers of 1987's Masters of the Universe viewed Castle Gray Skull? That power is not good nor evil, it is entirely dependent on who wields it and how. Like the director has a cameo as the voice of the One Wish Willow tech support or the customer helpline. And he's not some evil demonic figure, and he's not some whimsical faything. He is a very bored hourly worker who is like, Do you want to take the wish back? So he's gotten this call 50 times today and is just trying to get to the end of his shift. Number four is the most recent watch for me because I am still time of recording. 19 hours away from the new Spider-Man. The Odyssey from Christopher Nolan. That's four? I do currently have it fourth. There were just three movies that meant more to me. Maybe I will again raise my estimation of this on rewatch. I just felt that I was being edged with the sequence where he returns home to confront the suitors. I'm like, oh my god, would somebody please kill Robert Pattinson? You've made me wait so long for this. That's fair. That's fair.

SPEAKER_00 55:42

Are you going to do a recovered on The Odyssey?

SPEAKER_02 55:44

We are eventually going to cover that because would you not describe Odysseus as a man of constant sorrow?

SPEAKER_00 55:54

See, I was thinking of the 1970s Russian version, but sure.

SPEAKER_02 55:59

Don't be saying that on the internet. This might be the one episode Keith listens to. There is the 90s TV movie, I think it was, possibly miniseries with Armand DeSante, which we might also enter into the record. Anyway, what to say about except it is perfectly cast, every single role perfectly cast.

SPEAKER_00 56:19

I sorta like the reinterpretation of the myth to be about the breakdown of civility, about I love that. It's easy to read it as a Trump statement or a, you know, Mitch McConnell, actually. You know, Mitch McConnell might be regretting destroying norms.

SPEAKER_02 56:42

It's so much bigger than one political force, isn't it? It's about the idea that societies become great when we treat anyone like we would want to treat ourselves, even if it's under the threat that this beggar might be Zeus, you never know. And once you break that down for some sort of cheap gain, you can't put it back together. So just that third act revelation that one of the reasons taking him so long to get home is that he simply cannot forgive himself for his role in the destruction of Troy by violating the norms of their society to get there, and now society is crumbling in a way that they can't repair. And I could argue long about whether the we were the people of the sea means literally Odysseus's crew or the Greeks at Troy. I think it's just I think it's the latter because his crew encounters one village before it's nothing but monsters until they die.

SPEAKER_00 57:42

If have you read the book 1177 by Peter Klein? I have not. It's about the Bronze Age collapse, and it's really quite excellent, and I hadn't actually realized that the Odyssey was basically set right around then. Like, it is the musing of having the sea peoples be the breakdown of civilization actually kind of works on a timeline.

SPEAKER_02 58:10

Yeah. Like maybe I was still thinking in the back of my head about Oppenheimer name-dropping John F. Kennedy like they were announcing their intention about the Avengers initiative that I thought the Sea People were going to turn out to be the Romans, which is silly. Rome was centuries away.

SPEAKER_00 58:29

Ooh, but I do do like the Avengers initiative of that.

SPEAKER_02 58:32

The payoff of the whole Sea People thread was so good. And I kind of like that the gods are mostly absent except Athena. And I also like that there is so much room for debate and interpretation over what Zendia's Athena is. There are so many ways you can read that, and I think they're all cool in their own ways.

SPEAKER_00 58:55

I also, you know, Amanda and I drove away from the theater arguing about what the thesis of the movie was. It is a rich enough text to withstand multiple reads, multiple interpretations. And I think it is a real reductive mindset that tries to fit those interpretations into the classic, you know, poem Odyssey. It's not the same. It's a Christopher Nolan work, it's not a Homer work, it is a movie inspired by the Odyssey, but it is not a strict adaptation.

SPEAKER_02 59:34

Yeah, it is not trying to be a pure adaptation, and in so doing, it makes it so relevant to the modern world. And I think that's great. Nolan has things to say. My remaining three movies would have to be pretty damn great to compete with it, so let's see what they were. Number three is Project Hail Mary. This was an amazing, entertaining, and a moving emotional journey for me.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:00

I really like it. It is entertaining, but it's kind of weird to do a climate change metaphor and then deny that it's a climate change metaphor, and to suggest that everything will be solved by the nations of the world working together rather than turning on one another in the face of a planetary threat, which, I'm sorry, isn't happening with climate change. So I have problems with this movie. It's trying studiously too much to say nothing.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

Unfortunately, the one climate change metaphor movie that did try to say the government isn't going to save us, and we absolutely cannot count on tech billionaires to be of any use was Don't Look Up, and there has been some buyer's remorse on that movie that some people say came across too heavy-handed, and climate change researchers said that is pretty much how it feels. We're screaming to the audience, we're all going to die, and no one is taking it seriously. This is the second time you've been on this podcast to accuse a movie of being about climate change, but not address climate change. And of the two times that has happened, I do think this is a superior movie to Twisters with Glenn Powell.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:21

No, the last one that I this is the third time. Third time I've done that. The remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:30

Well, that was on Recovered. That was an entirely different podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:33

Well, my point is, Hollywood does this.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:36

Hollywood does get a little awkward about going all the way with the message, but at least there was an acknowledgement of this is how much the world's population is likely to die if everyone works together, and we know that they won't, so it's probably a much higher number.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:52

There's a lot I like about this movie. I don't think it's as good as the Odyssey.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:57

Well, there is a certain amount of vibes in my highly scientific and thus accurate movie rankings. And time may come that I flip those two. We will see. I've only seen each once and months apart, so we'll see if maybe my opinion changes when I re-watch the Odyssey, which I'm certain I'm going to by year's end. I might even try to get to an IMAX if that's still possible. Because I didn't the first time. And I didn't feel like I missed out quite as much as I did with Superman. I probably missed out slightly more than I did with Superman.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:28

I know that Edmonton is probably gonna keep running the 70mm IMAX of Odyssey through August, possibly into September. So you can probably do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:40

Number two is Canada's own Nirvana the Band, the show, the movie. This movie has no right to be this good. And yet, this is two guys and their two cameramen, both in and outside the movie, doing ridiculous buddy comedy that turns into one of the most clever time travel movies I've seen in ages, filmed on a complete guerrilla budget. It makes everything they pull off that much more impressive. The trailers show you that they are planning to skydive off the CN Tower into the sports arena underneath it in order to announce that they are playing a show at the Rivoli tonight, which they are not, but if they filled this demand, then surely they can. And that is has become an extra hilarious level to this movie. And I guess the show that spawned it is that they're constantly pulling these schemes to get a gig at the Rivoli, which is not an impressive venue. This is a two-story dive bar somewhere in downtown Toronto, where if you wanted a gig there, you could probably just call and ask. But then it becomes this really fun and clever time travel comedy. And the way in which one of the main characters realizes that he has traveled back to 2008. I don't want to spoil because it is incredible, but just such an amazing moment. And this is after a Gian Gameshi jump scare to tie back to Jimmy Saville. There's all these little subtle hints like there are still ads for Subway featuring Jared, the guy who lost all that weight eating Subway sandwiches in order to become thin enough to prey on children. Ads for the Gian Gameshi show on CBC radio. But then the ultimate, wait, no, what? I must be in the past moment is just incredible. So, loved that movie. It is almost, if not quite, my new hundreds of beavers, and have a demanding people watch it with me, and have not yet succeeded, but I will. Damn it, I will. I plan to see it. And number one for me has to be the sheep detectives, because I went in for a fun romp about sheep solving a murder, and I got that, but I also got a powerful treatise on memory and grief. And I didn't expect that. I did not think the sheeps that solve murder were gonna make me cry.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

Okay. Now, you haven't seen either of my top two movies of the year.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:08

Well, you better tell us about them then, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:10

Actually, sorry, no, my first and third, because Odyssey is vying for the top spot. But in third spot, there's this movie called it's a documentary called Andre is an idiot. And okay, do you mind me ranting? This is gonna take a bit. Sure, go ahead. So back in 2003, just before I went to Manchester, I was walking with my mom on the park. And out of nowhere, she brings up the fact that her doctor wants her to go and get a colonoscopy. And she says, But I really don't want to. I eat healthy, you know, I I think I'm fine. And I said, You know, Mom, the doctor's saying you should get a checkup. You know, I know it's not a lot of fun, but precaution. She doesn't listen. She never did. And about 18 months later, she Was diagnosed with a terminal cancer that had started in her colon and had metastasized. So this movie came out sometime in early February, a few days after my mom had passed from that cancer. And this documentary is about a guy who has put off having a colonoscopy repeatedly, and gets diagnosed with a terminal colon cancer. And it is him chronicling his last days and trying to deal with that with as much good humor and grace as he possibly can. And maybe it was just the context of seeing this in February, but it is a very difficult movie to watch. And it's very good, and it hurt, and maybe it helped me to process some stuff watching it. So yeah, that's in my top three.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:57

Yeah, I can see how that would be extra affecting that circumstance.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:01

Yeah, like for me that's a contextual piece. But it wouldn't have worked if it weren't a good movie. Like it is a very well-made, well-told documentary on a very difficult subject for me. So I do recommend that. And then the other one, the movie that is vying with Odyssey for my top pick, is Boots Riley's I Love Boosters.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:26

This is probably the maddest I've been at myself for not wanting to leave the house to go to a movie, because I do desperately want to see this movie. Even if it lost me 40 to 50 million in our fantasy box office league.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:39

It is A Love It or Hate It. I watched it with three people, two of whom were actively angry that they had sat through it afterwards.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:50

Is one of them the guy who wanted to watch Balls Out?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:54

No. No. These are these are people who I respect, who have good taste in movies in general. These are not these are not people I would dismiss. It's just so out there, so all over the place, so filled with crazy ideas, and I mean it goes from a workplace comedy with a weird clothes store to a heist movie where they're stealing clothes, to a sci-fi adventure with a teleportation machine that they use to steal the clothes, to having a beam of pure Marxist dialectic that changes things to their most communist form. I that's not I'm not even making a metaphor. There is a a ray gun that shoots pure Marxist dialectic.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:49

No, I I buy that because I did watch Sorry to Bother You, which I don't even want to try to describe what happens in the third act of that movie. But is the perfect sci-fi bonkers I what is even happening on my screen right now? Parable about the importance of unionization, because corporations left to their own devices will bring back slave labor, but eventually that won't be enough. Because the line will flatten. There will come a time when slave labor's boost to profits wears off and they will need the next thing because that is the problem with running the society on line goes up capitalism.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:34

I haven't even mentioned that I Love Boosters involves a demon who sucks women's souls out through their pussies while giving oral sex. Okay. It is lot to unpack in this movie. And there's a scene with a cop car chase where the Marxist Rey gets turned on reverse, and you get to see the ultimate form of demented capitalist cop. It is buckwild and beautifully filmed and laugh out loud and Demi Moore, it is. I know she was in The Substance last year, but this is her finest hour. Have I convinced you to watch I Love Boosters?

SPEAKER_02 1:10:19

I mean, I was pretty much convinced to begin with, so I would say yes. Have I convinced you to watch The Mandalorian Grogu? God no. Now, will the Odyssey creep up my rankings on Rewatch? Will Supergirl drop down it on Rewatch? Who's to say at pro time of recording? You can find out by continuing to follow me on Letterboxd, Ryan Danaforth, also threads Instagram and Blue Sky. We are Oscar V audience and all those things, and Writing Therapy Productions.com. You can find all of our episodes there and our other projects. You can follow Hugo Book Club, Olaf, Tell Them How.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:56

At Hugoclub.blogspot.ca is the uh website, and the Blue Sky handle is HugobookClub.bsky.social.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:09

And you can find everything Aaron's been doing at a flimsyplan.com, and you can follow Claire by following me or Aaron. We'll be back soon, hopefully with our break into the 2020s in what could have been the Trash Oscars, and in another way, definitely was. And see what happens when the Asian markets stop having Hollywood product to check out and realize that maybe they made some things themselves. And Claire gets despondent that we are talking about the wrong demon hunters. But until then, we'll see you at the ceremony.